Although I’d been planning the site re-design for a while, and had even created some different test designs, I’ve recently fancied the idea of having WordPress act as a content management system (CMS) for the whole site. I’ve got other websites that run using WP, so if I can get it all working here, they should be a breeze.

It’s actually easier for me to work on the live site than it is to try and recreate a FreeBSD, Apache, PHP etc environment on my Windows desktop. I have tried to keep the original search page going, although other sections of the original site no longer work apparently due to WordPress being installed. At the time of writing, the FAQ page had been created with the help of the FAQ-Tastic plugin, which should allow me to put context-related questions on different pages, without having to manually recreate them. I’d like it to be a bit more powerful though, so I’ve emailed the developers with some suggestions (I haven’t got the time at the moment to hack the plugin myself).

My main task now is getting the search function working, creating the templates and styling them. Once this is done, the other sections of the site will be added as and when they happen to get done. As this is a non-commercial site, I don’t have to make promises about deadlines!